I did it again! My dear old friend Chandler (you might remember blog posts about her apartment from forever ago!) and I planned this little weekend jaunt down to Charleston, SC back in April, and I have to say it was nice and motivating to have something like this to look forward to throughout the summer! Then it totally crept up and we were on our way. Crazy how that happens.

Charleston is SUCH a beautiful city. I visited with my family briefly about a year ago, so when Chandler suggested we go there I was super excited to go back. The city is just so amazingly historically intact—it’s a total fantasyland if you’re interested in old buildings and history.

The real impetus for the trip was to catch a live show of one of our favorite podcasts, My Favorite Murder! Where my murderinos at?! If you’re not familiar, I’ll try to explain it like the hosts, Karen and Georgia, do: it’s a true crime/comedy podcast, which is a complicated combo to negotiate yet they make it work. Each week, they individually pick a murder from history and then recap it for the other one, and that’s basically the whole thing. It never gets old. And there’s an endless supply of murder because people are monsters! Karen and Georgia’s voices have kept me company for literal hours and hours while I’ve plugged away on projects on the house and whatnot, so being in a room with them performing live was so weird and crazy—both the same and different than I expected. It was a lot of fun.

In any case, the podcast is super crazy popular and has a rad population of fans, so if it sounds interesting to you I’d HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend starting from the beginning so that you, too, can develop a close, personal, one-sided bond with these women as their goofy idea for a podcast becomes, like, an international sensation before your very ears. Otherwise you might just be very annoyed by it all.

OH ALSO REAL QUICK: because people simply cannot get enough murder and comedy in combination, getting tickets to one of these shows was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever been tasked with doing. I had to join a fan club to get pre-sale access to the tickets and even those sold out in about 6 seconds flat. Eek! Sometime before that, I figured out that my friend Lauren who runs the Historic Charleston Foundation is also a murderino, as is her friend Gray, so we all went together with the 4 tickets I was able to snag. So the show was on Friday, and then every Monday they post mini-episodes where they basically read off listener emails of their own murder-related or otherwise creepy/weird/macabre stories. And on this Monday’s episode, THEY READ LAUREN’S EMAIL! Which, by the way, was a really fascinating insight into how the Historic Charleston Foundation conducts research on the properties they own, plus some surprising finds from inside some very old walls. It’s Minisode #89, if you’re interested!

So that was cool.

Otherwise, we pretty much just walked around, ate, and tried to take in as much of Charleston’s absurd beauty as we could before heading home.

I MEAN, JUST LOOK AT THIS PLACE! It’s insane. I think due to a combination of early and comprehensive historic protections and a fairly mild climate, Charleston kind of reminds me of what a place like Kingston might look and feel like if it hadn’t fallen victim to terrible urban-renewal policies and the unmitigated trend of replacing windows, doors, and exterior cladding with plastics and metals. It’s really something.

So many original windows! So many working shutters! SIIIIGHHHHH.

Marble floors like this are all over the city.

I’m crying.

I love this house and this arborvitae situation.

We ate very well during our short trip, including brunch at this restaurant called 5Church on the morning we left! Such a great space. The food was awesome too.

There are several historic house museums right in downtown Charleston, including The Nathaniel Russel House and the Aiken-Rhett House which I toured last time, and the Calhoun Mansion which I toured this time! LOOK AT THAT VESTIBULE TILE! The Calhoun Mansion doesn’t allow photography but the other two (managed by the Historic Charleston Foundation) do.

ANYWAY. Knowing more or less what I was getting into, I tried to come to Charleston a little more prepared this time around than last by remembering to bring my Nix Mini sensor! I know I’ve mentioned this thing on Instagram but I can’t remember if we’ve discussed it here…it’s a little ping-pong-ball-sized device that can scan and match paint colors on the go! Out in the wild! It pairs with an app on your phone, which allows you to choose between a bunch of different paint brands and save and organize colors you’ve scanned into collections. It’s a little addictive! Because Charleston picks paint colors really, really well, I thought I’d scan great colors here and there as we walked and put together a palette for the city! Is that fun? Not fun? I thought it was fun. Maybe we’ll do it again someday. Maybe we’ll never do it again ever. Either way, if you’re looking to inject your color scheme with some southern style, here ya go! Do with it what you will!